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On The Thermodynamic Model of Oil Extraction by Hill’s Group

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On The Thermodynamic Model of Oil Extraction by Hill’s Group

Unread postby Jibdul » Sat 25 Feb 2017, 02:38:58

Peak Oil Barrel Article
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Re: On The Thermodynamic Model of Oil Extraction by Hill’s G

Unread postby MD » Sat 25 Feb 2017, 05:09:36

Great stuff! And also excellent commentary. I understand it but it's way beyond my interest or ability to add to the discussion. Way too complex for my widdle brain :-)
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Re: On The Thermodynamic Model of Oil Extraction by Hill’s G

Unread postby Plantagenet » Sat 25 Feb 2017, 13:09:13

From the link:

From what has been discussed above, the thermodynamic analysis is incorrect and therefore any calculations and graphs based on this analysis must also be unreliable.

i.e. the Hills Group did their math wrong.
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Re: On The Thermodynamic Model of Oil Extraction by Hill’s G

Unread postby rockdoc123 » Sat 25 Feb 2017, 13:34:48

I suspect there are several serial thread abusers of the ETP variety that are currently having kittens over this!
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Re: On The Thermodynamic Model of Oil Extraction by Hill’s G

Unread postby AdamB » Sat 25 Feb 2017, 14:11:24

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Jibdul', '[')url=http://peakoilbarrel.com/on-the-thermodynamic-model-of-oil-extraction-by-the-hills-group/]Peak Oil Barrel Article[/url]


It doesn't make any more sense when they discuss it, as compared to how it doesn't make any sense when discussed here. Do you have a comment on how the same gibberish discussed there is any different than when the gibberish is discussed here?

The reason why it makes no sense, for those who prefer pictures. Enjoy!

Image
Plant Thu 27 Jul 2023 "Personally I think the IEA is exactly right when they predict peak oil in the 2020s, especially because it matches my own predictions."

Plant Wed 11 Apr 2007 "I think Deffeyes might have nailed it, and we are just past the overall peak in oil production. (Thanksgiving 2005)"
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Re: On The Thermodynamic Model of Oil Extraction by Hill’s G

Unread postby AdamB » Sat 25 Feb 2017, 14:14:16

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Plantagenet', 'F')rom the link:

From what has been discussed above, the thermodynamic analysis is incorrect and therefore any calculations and graphs based on this analysis must also be unreliable.

i.e. the Hills Group did their math wrong.


And their statistics.
And their resource estimates.
And their assumptions of lifting costs and dynamics.
And their understanding of price and its derivative components.
And their understanding of basic oil field practice.
And their understanding of basic modeling/engineering techniques of backcasting for validation.

The question is, did they get anything RIGHT, not what that got wrong.
Plant Thu 27 Jul 2023 "Personally I think the IEA is exactly right when they predict peak oil in the 2020s, especially because it matches my own predictions."

Plant Wed 11 Apr 2007 "I think Deffeyes might have nailed it, and we are just past the overall peak in oil production. (Thanksgiving 2005)"
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Re: On The Thermodynamic Model of Oil Extraction by Hill’s G

Unread postby Cog » Sun 26 Feb 2017, 06:34:40

Do I care how much energy that is lost in the electrical grid during transmission?

Nope and neither should you care how much heat is lost during combustion. Its a point of irrelevancy as long as the end product produces something useful to the consumer.
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Re: On The Thermodynamic Model of Oil Extraction by Hill’s G

Unread postby Tanada » Sun 26 Feb 2017, 08:16:17

The ETP model is nothing but an attempt at curve fitting the EROEI model of oil use using different terminology to sweep in a different newer set of gullible people into agreeing with the author's personal doom vision.

Throw in some equations with a slew of very loosely calculated variables and you can make any equation agree with any prediction simply by tweaking the variables to get the desired outcome. The more variables you put in the equation the easier it is to tweak the outcome by adjusting them until you have a result you want.

Meanwhile in the real world not only do you not know the actual value of those variables, many of them are unknowable with current technology and to make things even worse there are several to many variables not even accounted for in the calculation because of the unknown unknowns. Things like enhanced oil recovery efficiency which is based upon multiple variables starting with porosity and viscosity and rapidly growing from there based on technique employed.
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Re: On The Thermodynamic Model of Oil Extraction by Hill’s G

Unread postby vtsnowedin » Sun 26 Feb 2017, 12:33:05

Your diagram is wrong on it's face. The unavoidable waste heat is not by itself but split between the other two categories. The waste heat in the oil delivered to the economy is not wasted until after delivery. Then of course the fact that the numbers for 2016 are off by a factor of ten just makes it silly.
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Re: On The Thermodynamic Model of Oil Extraction by Hill’s G

Unread postby KaiserJeep » Sun 26 Feb 2017, 14:30:15

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Tanada', 'T')he ETP model is nothing but an attempt at curve fitting the EROEI model of oil use using different terminology to sweep in a different newer set of gullible people into agreeing with the author's personal doom vision.

Throw in some equations with a slew of very loosely calculated variables and you can make any equation agree with any prediction simply by tweaking the variables to get the desired outcome. The more variables you put in the equation the easier it is to tweak the outcome by adjusting them until you have a result you want.

Meanwhile in the real world not only do you not know the actual value of those variables, many of them are unknowable with current technology and to make things even worse there are several to many variables not even accounted for in the calculation because of the unknown unknowns. Things like enhanced oil recovery efficiency which is based upon multiple variables starting with porosity and viscosity and rapidly growing from there based on technique employed.



Well said. But the reason that one can NEVER successfully model large complex systems where human behavior is one of those variables is that there is no calculus of human behavior. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle applies, or more precisely in the macro world inhabited by human beings, the observer effect.

This is why economic models of all types fail to display even two significant digits - because people know about and react to their published results. There may possibly exist somebody somewhere who has a Peak Oil model that works and is accurate. But it won't be ETP, the Thermodynamic Model discussed in this thread, or even some variant of M. King Hubbert's seminal works. Because all those got published and were thus rendered inaccurate and incapable of being confirmed.

It's a Catch-22 sort of problem - when you achieve accuracy in a model, and you publish results, many people revere your work and it modifies their behavior, invalidating your model in a short period. If you create such a model, you cannot ever share it with anybody at all or it will be broken by the psychological impact upon humans.

You can bask in self-admiration from such work, tempered by the fact that everybody around you considers you more than a trifle eccentric. Or you can publish your working model and cause it to stop working, resulting in public discredit. Physics is frequently a bitch, even when it's principles are used to understand human behavior.
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Re: On The Thermodynamic Model of Oil Extraction by Hill’s G

Unread postby dcoyne78 » Sun 26 Feb 2017, 20:32:24

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pstarr', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Yoshua', 'T')he article by SK is total gibberish. Amazing.

Worse and obvious the article contains a stupid egregious and intentional misprint of a simple ETP formula.

It assigns a negative value to theta, waste heat. that is dumb.


The ETP formula uses a backwards convention, by leaving off the negative sign.

When heat flows into a system Q_dot is positive, when the heat flows out of a system (temperature decreases) Q_dot is negative.

So when the oil is extracted from an oil reservoir, it cools, at least on planet Earth. So Q_dot divided by T (in Kelvin) would be negative as correctly shown by SK at Peak Oil Barrel. This would be equal to sigma only if it is assumed that there are no irreversibilities while the oil is being extracted.

That assumption is very likely to be false and the analysis breaks down.
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Re: On The Thermodynamic Model of Oil Extraction by Hill’s G

Unread postby sparky » Sun 26 Feb 2017, 20:58:30

.
human behavior is not erratic , it is totally based on self interest
it has one self , now , at the center , then in decreasing order , one long term advantage, family and friends
then those who are close to us in distance and connections , fellows workers , neighbors , citizen
plus a vague commitment to the Human race ,
but a sad mutt down the road will trump all the population of Zimbabwe .

As the old saying goes , people have their heart on the left and their wallet on the right
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Re: On The Thermodynamic Model of Oil Extraction by Hill’s G

Unread postby KaiserJeep » Sun 26 Feb 2017, 21:01:42

sparky, you are real close, but you described primate behaviors, not humans. However, we ARE apes, and we behave as apes, modified by elaborate rituals.
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Re: On The Thermodynamic Model of Oil Extraction by Hill’s G

Unread postby Tanada » Sun 26 Feb 2017, 22:45:08

This was posted over on the defense of all things ETP thread but greatly deserves your attention. Ugo Bardi does a take down of the faulty concepts that form the foundation of the ETP model of oil production.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('donstewart', 'U')go Bardi
Takes a swing at the Hill's Group. Catastrophism is wrong.
http://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com

Don Stewart


$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Ugo Bardi', '[')size=150]Catastrophism is popular, but not necessarily right. Debunking the "Hill's Group" analysis of the future of the oil industry[/size]

Catastrophism is popular. I can see that with the "Cassandra's Legacy" blog. Every time I publish something that says that we are all going to die and the world to end, it gets many more hits than when I publish posts arguing that we can do something to avoid the incoming disaster. The latest confirmation of this trend came from three posts by Louis Arnoux that I published here last summer (link to the first one). All three are in the list of the ten most successful posts ever published here.

Arnoux argues that the main problem that we have today is the result of the diminishing energy yield (or net energy, or EROI) of fossil fuels. This is a correct approach, but Arnoux bases his case on the results of the calculations reported by an organization called "The Hill's Group", a rather obscure entity that claims to be able to predict the future of oil production on the basis of a mathematical treatment based on the evaluation of the entropy of the extraction process. And they sell their report for US $28 (shipping included).

Neither Arnoux nor the "Hill's Group" are the first to argue that diminishing EROEI is at the basis of most of our troubles. But the Hill's report gained a considerable popularity and it has been favorably commented on many blogs and Web sites. It is t is understandable: the report has an aura of scientific correctness that comes from its use of basic thermodynamic principles and of the concept of entropy, correctly understood as the force behind the depletion problem. There is just a small problem: the report is badly flawed.

When I published Arnoux's posts on this blog, I thought they were qualitatively correct, and I still think they are. But I didn't have the time to look at the Hill's report in detail. Now, some smart people did and their results show the many fundamental flaws of the treatment. You can read the result in English by Seppo Korpela (write to me to get a copy, ugo.bardi(thingything)unifi.it) and in Spanish by Carlos De Castro and Antonio Turiel.

Entropy is a complex subject and delving into the Hill's report and the criticism to it requires a certain effort. I won't go into details, here. Let me just say that it simply makes no sense to start from the textbook definition of entropy to calculate the net energy of crude oil. The approximations made by the report are so large to make the whole treatment useless (to say nothing of the errors it contains). Using the textbook definition of entropy to analyze oil production is like using quantum mechanics to design a plane. It is true that all the electrons in a plane have to obey Schroedinger's equation, but that's not the way engineers design planes.

Of course, the problem of diminishing EROEI exists and the way to study it is based on the "life cycle analysis" (LCA) of the process. This method takes into account entropy indirectly, in terms of heat losses, without attempting the impossible task of calculating it from first principles. By means of this method, we can see that, at present, oil production still provides a reasonable energy return on investment (EROEI) as you can read, for instance, in a recent paper by Brandt et al.

But if producing oil is still predictable, why is the oil industry in such dire troubles? (see this post on the SRSrocco report, for instance). Well, let me cite a post by Nate Hagens:
In the last 10 years the global credit market has grown at 12% per year allowing GDP growth of only 3.5% and increasing global crude oil production less than 1% annually. We're so used to running on various treadmills that the landscape doesn't look all too scary. But since 2008, despite energies fundamental role in economic growth, it is access to credit that is supporting our economies, in a surreal, permanent, Faustian bargain sort of way. As long as interest rates (govt borrowing costs) are low and market participants accept it, this can go on for quite a long time, all the while burning through the next higher cost tranche of extractable carbon fuel in turn getting reduced benefits from the "Trade" creating other societal pressures.

Society runs on energy, but thinks it runs on money. In such a scenario, there will be some paradoxical results from the end of cheap (to extract) oil. Instead of higher prices, the global economy will first lose the ability to continue to service both the principal and the interest on the large amounts of newly created money/debt, and we will then probably first face deflation. Under this scenario, the casualty will not be higher and higher prices to consumers that most in peak oil community expect, but rather the high and medium cost producers gradually going out of business due to market prices significantly below extraction costs. Peak oil will come about from the high cost tranches of production gradually disappearing.

I don't expect the government takeover of the credit mechanism to stop, but if it does, both oil production and oil prices will be quite a bit lower. In the long run it's all about the energy. For the foreseeable future, it's mostly about the credit

In the end, it is simply dumb to think that the system will automatically collapse when and because the net energy of the oil production process becomes negative (or the EROEI smaller than one). No, it will crash much earlier because of factors correlated to the control system that we call "the economy". It is a behavior typical of complex adaptative systems that are never understandable in terms of mere energy return considerations.

The final consideration of this post would simply be to avoid losing time with the Hill's report. But there remains a big problem: a report that claims to be based on thermodynamics and uses resounding words such as "entropy" plays into the human tendency of believing what one wants to believe. And catastrophism is popular for various reasons, some perfectly good. One is that we are really risking various kinds of catastrophes in the near future as the result of both climate change and mineral depletion. Unfortunately, stunts such as the one by Hill&Arnoux end up being (correctly) debunked and they put in a bad light all the people who are seriously trying to alert the public of the risks ahead.

And so, what can we do? Reality is one, but both cornucopianism and catastrophism are human reactions to it. We can find a middle way between these extremes and keep going.


cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2017/02/peak-oil-catastrophism-is-popular-but.html
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Re: On The Thermodynamic Model of Oil Extraction by Hill’s G

Unread postby Outcast_Searcher » Mon 27 Feb 2017, 00:01:18

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Ugo Bardi', '
')The approximations made by the report are so large to make the whole treatment useless (to say nothing of the errors it contains). Using the textbook definition of entropy to analyze oil production is like using quantum mechanics to design a plane. It is true that all the electrons in a plane have to obey Schroedinger's equation, but that's not the way engineers design planes.

Very well put indeed.

Not that I'd expect the ETPers to listen to this logic any more than they listen to all the other logic re the madness that is tryng to predict the future with ithe ETP theory.
Given the track record of the perma-doomer blogs, I wouldn't bet a fast crash doomer's money on their predictions.
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Re: On The Thermodynamic Model of Oil Extraction by Hill’s G

Unread postby Yoshua » Tue 28 Feb 2017, 06:48:40

Adam

The Hill's group hopes that someone looking at the etp model will find a way work around the problem and find a solution. If you think that you have a solution then that is fine.

The energy mix is of course used to produce petroleum. All forms of energy production used petroleum somewhere along their production line. Every energy producer is trying to use the lowest priced BTU in their production.

As I understand it the oil extractor can use the gas in the well to run the pumps and injectors or use the crude to run crude engines to run the operation.

The TOTAL ENERGY COST to produce petroleum is the: Science, technology, universities, minerals, industries, capex, opex, infrastructure, financial system, governments, military, people someway involved in production... The entire oil production civilization consumes energy... down to the last cup of coffee you drink in the morning before you go to work.
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Re: On The Thermodynamic Model of Oil Extraction by Hill’s G

Unread postby vtsnowedin » Tue 28 Feb 2017, 09:20:34

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Yoshua', 'A')dam
.........

As I understand it the oil extractor can use the gas in the well to run the pumps and injectors or use the crude to run crude engines to run the operation.

The TOTAL ENERGY COST to produce petroleum is the: Science, technology, universities, minerals, industries, capex, opex, infrastructure, financial system, governments, military, people someway involved in production... The entire oil production civilization consumes energy... down to the last cup of coffee you drink in the morning before you go to work.

More nonsense!!
Show us one of these engines that burns WTI just as it comes out of the ground if you would please. The Saudis burn some of their crude directly to turn steam turbines but they are the only ones using raw crude that way..
The total energy cost is measured in BTUs and Governments ,military and coffee are measured in dollars which are subject to inflation. Your mixing apples with oranges yet again. The labor cost of installing a length of well casing steel pipe varies greatly depending on where the well is. The energy cost of making the steel in that pipe is constant and has to be divided by all the barrels of oil that flow through that pipe.
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Re: On The Thermodynamic Model of Oil Extraction by Hill’s G

Unread postby Yoshua » Tue 28 Feb 2017, 15:52:53

Crude oil engine

http://powerplants.man.eu/fuels/crude-oil

If you chose to produce electricity with the crude oil engine, then that's fine. Most new diesel engines can run on crude as well.

But never mind, I'm just a civilian, a chef by profession.
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Re: On The Thermodynamic Model of Oil Extraction by Hill’s G

Unread postby vtsnowedin » Tue 28 Feb 2017, 16:17:00

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Yoshua', 'C')rude oil engine

http://powerplants.man.eu/fuels/crude-oil

If you chose to produce electricity with the crude oil engine, then that's fine. Most new diesel engines can run on crude as well.

But never mind, I'm just a civilian, a chef by profession.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'O')ur crude oil technology and experience date back to 1986. Since then, the company has sold several crude oil engines of various sizes to all parts of the world.

Several does not an industry standard make. :)
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